Day 28 has passed without any slips, so just two more days to go to complete all 8 challenges.
Today, I finished the campaign of Splinter Cell on PS3, great game with amazing graphics and loads of tension. I’ve got the game on loan from my mate Brad, but I will definitely buy the game now.
It’s interesting world now, aged 47, I’ve gone from a black & white TV with two channels to choose from, telephones that you had dial by literally turning a dial for each number, before PC’s, before video, before the internet!!
Now, some of the things that I’ve grown up with, like TV and more latterly, email, are things that are likely to disappear in the not too distant future.
I find that I spend more time on gaming, YouTube, social media and virtually no time on TV, and less and less, on email.
Technology is really going to dominate more and more of our lives. In many ways, that is for the good, as technology, if used wisely, will be able to solve many of the enormous challenges the world will face.
I was discussing all of this with Mrs D today, the conversation drifted, and she reminisced about her early years in Porto as a child and all the different smells of certain shops, like the pencil & paper shop. I then remember the old newsagents that I went to as a child, Hewitt’s, and all the soldiers, airfix models and assortments of toys that were there.
I loved that place as a child, rushing there with my pocket money and wandering around the jammed packed shelving. Now we’d simply go to Amazon, click and the item appears at the door in a day or so. Nowhere near the excitement of a trip to Hewitt’s and I doubt anyone in 30 years will reminisce about buying something on Amazon.
We both concluded that the world had changed forever and that some of the smallness of the world had gone. Now everything is global, connected and ubiquitous. Some of the memories are indeed tainted with rose coloured spectacles, ‘it wasn’t like that in my day’ is a common phrase that all generations use. Not all things were good.
However, there is an opportunity to turn away from the ‘global village’, where every high street is rammed with the faceless and soulless outlets, that dominate every part of the globe. To turn away from only ever ‘googling’ something, to then just clicking to buy.
By using collaboration and the principles of a sharing economy, smallness can return and compete with the giant corporations.
If businesses are smart and work together to share social capital, instead of financial capital, then previously non-viable businesses, that provided the smallness and more human experiences, can thrive within a community focused world.
Then we will create something to reminisce about again.
Philip Dodson 